Bryant stood in his saddle, opening up his coat. Inside it a white hen ticked her head. Bryant yanked her out and wildly wrung her around, the chicken flapping and squawking until the neck broke off and the body flew up on the porch. The chicken walked around spurting blood while Bryant pitched her head on the roof. It rattled down on the shingles.

The Parker girl merely picked the chicken up by a white wing and walked into the house, locking the screen door behind her, and we walked our horses back to the street through the yard pansies.

I said, “That didn’t work worth beans, did it.”

Bryant said, “It stunk, is what it did.”

And Bob rode his horse up the porch steps of the federal prosecutor’s white house in the middle of town. He opened the screen and ducked low to ride in under the lintel. The animal knocked over a porcelain candle stand and a lamp of dangling prisms and then thudded over the woven rug to the kitchen. A little girl turned in her chair like a spinster. “What on earth!” she said. The attorney was getting out of his chair, a napkin around his neck, when Bob ducked under the doorway. They were having a supper of liver and onions. The wife was gone. Two daughters were at the oak table and the man was saying things like, “See here!” and “This is an outrage!”

Bob slapped his pistol up from his boot holster, just like he’d practiced. “My name is Robert Dalton. You have a warrant for my arrest and you have my brother Grat in jail.”

The attorney sat back down, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and tossed it. “That’s so.”

“You can persuade a grand jury to no-bill him.”

“That’s exactly what I intend to do.”

That stymied Bob. “You’re letting him off? Just like that?”

The attorney had eaten of the liver. He was chewing. “Aren’t you going to thank me?”

The horse stepped from one shoe to the next. Its tail swished flour on the counter. The girls were looking at that. My brother said, “Excuse me but I’m just the least bit pixilated by all this. Can you explain why you’re letting him go free?”

“The evidence inspires it. He was arrested on the suspicion he stole Bob Rogers’s horses, but none of those mustangs carried the Rogers brand. Plus there’s a problem with the arresting officer abetting a vigilante group. And your brother’s defense attorney was going to call on Judge Isaac Parker as a character witness. That might have been humiliating. It’s a complicated case. I’ve got plenty to do just pleading the easy ones.”

My brother hung onto those words like he could listen forever. “Well, shucks,” he said. “Now you got me sorry I mussed up your house.”